CLINTON’S FATE

All more or less true. But all, ultimately, more or less irrelevant. A year from now, Clinton will be gone. Or at least he’ll be thoroughly disgraced, hanging on, hoping that impeachment is just too daunting a task for Congress to tackle in the last two years of his term.

Wishful thinking? Sure. A lot of thinking is. But if the wish here is father to the thought, it’s a wish, I believe, grounded in reality. Indeed, the assertion that Clinton’s cover-up will fail is based on the assumption that reality does matter; that, on an issue of this magnitude, truth does trump spin; that our public life has not been entirely taken over by the blowers of smoke and the manipulators of mirrors; that facts are, after all, stubborn things.

For the following facts are, it seems to me, plain — and will become, over the next few months, even more evidently and irrefutably so:

President Clinton accepted sexual favors in the Oval Office from a 21-year- old intern.

President Clinton lied about it under oath, and to the American people.

President Clinton urged others to lie about it under oath and to obstruct justice.

And President Clinton has supervised an effort to conceal all of this from view — to stonewall, to deceive, and to threaten and intimidate potential truth-tellers.

But he won’t get away with it. Here’s how justice will be done and the truth will out.

While Republicans have lost their nerve, and the American people are a bit confused, Kenneth Starr is doing his duty. Once Inspector Clouseau, the pitiful bumbler from the Pink Panther movies, Starr has become Inspector Javert, the fierce law-enforcer of Hugo’s Les Miserables. And it’s worth recalling that, despite his (presumably) low approval ratings, Inspector Javert never gave up and did, after a fashion, get his man. Starr is not giving up. That’s the meaning of his recent announcement that he will forgo the deanships he was to fill at Pepperdine University and stick with an investigation whose end, he said, is “not in sight.”

The end may not be in sight, but Starr’s course is pretty clear. He will move on three fronts at once. He will litigate Clinton’s ludicrous claims to executive privilege and Secret Service privilege, and he will ultimately win. The Secret Service testimony in particular will be helpful to his case of perjury and subornation of perjury against Clinton. But Starr won’t wait on this litigation to press ahead on two other fronts: reporting what he has discovered to Congress, and indicting a few key figures who have not told the truth. The trial or trials that follow will uncover yet more information, allowing for an even fuller detailing of Clinton’s impeachable offenses.

This means that, in the next couple of months, we should see a criminal indictment of Monica Lewinsky (and perhaps others, like Bruce Lindsey) for perjury and subornation of perjury. This indictment will be a “speaking indictment” — a document that thoroughly lays out the charges against Lewinsky (and possibly others), along with the evidence on which those charges are based. Clinton may well be named an unindicted co-conspirator in such a document. But even if he is not, the public will get for the first time a clear and comprehensive narrative of the case, an account that ties together and places in context all the suggestive snippets we’ve seen so far – – the talking points, the meetings, the gifts, the job offers — in a way that makes clear how systematic and purposeful the president’s efforts to obstruct justice have been.

This “speaking indictment” could be accompanied by a simultaneous report from Starr to Congress, in fulfillment of his duty under Section 595c of the Independent Counsel Act to refer “sufficient and credible evidence” of possible impeachable offenses by the president to Congress. Whether or not Starr formally submits a report to Congress at this stage, he will make clear that he expects more evidence to come from the forthcoming trial or trials (and from testimony after Clinton’s privilege claims have been overcome). Starr will therefore suggest that the House hold off on any immediate impeachment hearings, pending the development of further evidence — while putting Congress and the country on notice that he believes the possibility of impeachment needs to be taken seriously.

After indictments come this summer, things could move fairly quickly. Federal law requires a trial within 70 days of an indictment. Even with various delaying motions, a trial within several months is likely. In addition, Starr may bring the case, not in D.C., but in Virginia, where a grand jury has also been impaneled and where the most striking attempt to suborn perjury may well have taken place — on January 13 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, when Linda Tripp was wired. Virginia has a speedier docket for federal trials than Washington. So we should have, before the end of the year, an open trial in federal court of a conspiracy to obstruct justice, in which Bill Clinton plays a central role — or a situation in which Monica Lewinsky has turned state’s evidence and helped Starr compile a comprehensive, and damning, report to Congress.

Clinton will be sorely tempted to use an indictment of Lewinsky as an excuse to claim that Starr is out of control and to fire him. For Clinton will know better than anyone else how vulnerable he really is. Therefore, the smearing of Starr and his colleagues will undoubtedly intensify over the next months. But Clinton probably won’t risk firing Starr before November 1998; and even if he does, the relevant panel of federal judges will presumably appoint one of Starr’s deputies to succeed him. The better alternative for Clinton might be to encourage the use of all possible means to delay a trial until after Election Day 1998 and then pardon Lewinsky, et al. — explaining to the nation that this was his only recourse in the face of an out-of- control prosecutor. But whether we have criminal convictions, a pardon, or simply a complete report to Congress by Starr, it’s pretty clear that by the end of this year the American people will have a more certain, more confident understanding of the president’s offenses. And the ball will be in the court of what presumably will still be a Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

Will the hapless Republicans drop the ball? It’s less likely than it would seem today. For one thing, months of publicity will lower Clinton’s poll numbers. More important, the key issue in this fall’s elections will be Clinton and his conduct. And Republicans — despite themselves, despite their timidity — will have to make this case: Keep us in control of the House to ensure that Clinton can be held accountable; giving Democrats a majority would mean giving Clinton a free pass. Whom do you trust more to conduct a fair inquiry into a matter of grave national importance: Judiciary chairman Henry Hyde or ranking Democrat John Conyers? Republicans will keep control of the House. And the very arguments that help them do so will make it harder for them to shirk their duty once the 106th Congress convenes in January 1999.

Meanwhile, we may see a little activity even in the current session of Congress. Would it be too much for Congress to hold oversight hearings into aspects of Clinton’s abuse of his position — for example, on the propriety of invoking executive privilege without informing Congress or the nation? Couldn’t Republicans at least begin to defend Starr and the integrity of the legal process? Is it entirely foolish to hope for a few serious speeches pointing out the gravity, and explaining the meaning, of Clinton’s behavior — his subordination of all the instrumentalities and purposes of government to his personal and legal interests? Newt Gingrich boasted recently that “we haven’t done anything except to prepare to receive a potential report from Judge Starr.” But a Republican Congress should do more than this. And surely it will do more than this before the end of this session.

In any case, in late January 1999, the GOP will have to respond to Clinton’s State of the Union address. The response will be delivered not by Trent Lott, as it was this year, but by someone like Henry Hyde. And unlike Lott’s response, in which the Senate majority leader refused even to mention the scandals — thereby legitimizing the Clinton line that the scandals are not a matter of real import, but rather a distraction from “the people’s business” — next year’s response will insist that Congress faces no more important business than that of holding the president to account. And then the impeachment hearings will begin.

Will it be too late? What about the argument that there will be no point undertaking such a task in the last two years of Clinton’s term? Two years is a long time to tolerate a president whose occupation of the office weakens and debases it. And two years might seem like a particularly long time to Democrats, as they view the prospect that Clinton and his sleaziness will define their party in the run-up to 2000.

What of the public? So far, the American people have chosen to avert their gaze, not wanting to confront the implications of the sordid goings-on in Clinton’s White House. But the trials and reports and hearings will change all that. And when they are forced to face the facts; when it becomes respectable to be indignant about lying and stonewalling, and, yes, about sexual outrageousness; when people notice that the president has no acceptable explanation of what happened and hasn’t even bothered to attempt one, then the American people will desert Clinton. Indeed, they will turn on him. They will realize that the president’s shameless lying has been an attempt to corrupt the entire country by making it complicit, by acquiescence, in his own corruption.

Right now, the attitude of the American people seems to be that of the president’s own press secretary. When asked whether he wanted to know the truth, Mike McCurry answered, “God, no. No, I really don’t want to know. I don’t know whether that’s escapism . . .” McCurry explains his own brand of escapism candidly: “Knowing the truth means that you have to tell the truth.” And for the American people, knowing the truth will mean having to judge on the basis of the truth. The action that follows from judging — forcing the president from office, or at least holding him in public disgrace — is unpleasant, and therefore the American people up until now have preferred ignorance. But ignorance will soon become hard to sustain.

Once the truth breaks through, all the easy talk about our new non- judgmental sophistication in sexual matters, about how “we’re becoming France” (Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism), and about how Americans are entering “a new age of maturity” (Gary Hart, who has an interest in such things), will be revealed as nonsense. Neither French nor Hollywood mores have taken over the country, and we are not about to have the morality of the casting couch take over the Oval Office. Americans’ “wobbly moralism,” in the words of Andrew Ferguson, will at last find its legs and reassert itself. Exploitative and adulterous sex; lying; obstruction of justice — Americans will reject them all, and the president who embodies them. That is Clinton’s fate.

The epitaph to Clinton’s presidency was provided by his wife during their famous 60 Minutes appearance on January 26, 1992, the one that helped save the Clinton candidacy: “Part of what I believe with all my heart is that the voters are tired of people who lie to them.” Hillary Clinton spoke the truth. She didn’t realize she was being prophetic.

William Kristol is editor and publisher of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.